How Canvs Plans To Be The Universal Currency For Consumer Emotions

As someone who has had, on many, many occasions, been forced to wade through a pile of open-ended responses on a survey form and attempt to make heads or tails of them, I will admit to uttering a silent fist-pumping “YESSS!!!” as Canvs CEO Jared Feldman explained his company’s latest product to me.

Canvs, which has been in the forefront of interpreting users’ emotional responses on social media, has taken their core product, infused it with healthy doses of AI and machine learning capability and turned it towards the aforementioned survey results, allowing companies to upload thousands of “why do you think that?” and “please tell us more” type comments and translate them into easy to understand analyses, making sense of something in just minutes that would normally take a team of humans several full days.

“Our goal is to create a Google for emotions,” Feldman tells me. “To create a simple way to understand how people react to things and how they feel. Emotions are impacting every organization, every business, every political organization, the economy. And there isn't a trusted standard for understanding how people feel, and why they feel that way.”

Feldman’s goal is to create such a standard and to then get it in the hands of researchers.

“What we noticed,” he said, “is that there are private emotions and public ones. Public emotions are the things that people post on social media. But private emotions are the ones that people express in anonymized surveys. Those are arguably far more important, and no one was doing a very good job of measuring those.”

What Feldman is doing is creating a way for businesses to understand those private emotions—why did someone feel good after buying something, why did a certain movie scene leave them feeling angry. “We see this as a powerful tool that allows businesses to understand the connection between emotions and actions taken—what emotion caused a sale or a recommendation or trip to the store? That’s all been a mystery until now.”

The Power of Automation

Canvs’ new system can take an infinite number of open-ended survey responses (e.g. “tell us what you think” versus closed-ended multiple choice questions) and process them in a matter of minutes. For the uninitiated, that’s a huge leap from what it would take to wade through those responses by hand, which Feldman estimates would take about sixteen hours. (And if you’ve ever had to process responses manually, you’ll know that’s not sixteen hours straight, but sixteen hours over the course of two or three days.)

After ingesting all the data, Canvs has an actual patented technology that can sort through the responses, separating what Feldman calls “who or what questions” from “how or why questions” in order to tease out what people are really feeling.

“If I ask you who your favorite actor is, there is emotion involved, but the answer is fairly straightforward. It could be Meryl Streep, it could be Frances McDormand, it could be Jennifer Lawrence. But it’s fairly straightforward. But if I ask you why Meryl Streep is your favorite actress, then you get into more complex emotions, because everyone will have different reasons for how they feel and it becomes tougher to quickly pull out a common thread. Our software is designed to do just that, however—parse through language, find common threads and common themes and compile them in an easy to understand, easy to present document that doesn’t require an advanced degree to activate or to understand.”

Politics and Entertainment

While Feldman points out that Canvs’ new service is pertinent to just about any sort of company, two use cases that immediately popped into my mind were politics and entertainment.

Rather than guessing at how voters feel about issues (especially behind closed doors), political parties could make use of Canvs software to quickly parse through qualitative research with open-ended questions and identify, to Feldman’s point, both what voters were feeling and what emotions caused them to take action (e.g., vote a certain way.)

That doesn’t have to be cynical “whichever way the wind is blowing”-ism either. It can help officials identify issues that are important to voters they may not have considered before and help them to formulate policy that addresses those issues.

The other obvious use case is for entertainment. Networks and studios spend millions of dollars every year testing everything from TV series to movie scripts. By using Canvs software to process that testing, they could save countless hours, not to mention countless dollars.

Feldman is one step ahead of me—Canvs has been working with NBCU on the lead-up to this year’s upfronts.

“Leading up to upfronts is this TV hunger games,” says Benoit Landry, senior director of program research at NBCU. “We’re talking about a four-to-six week period for every broadcast network, and the challenge is to try to decipher which of these pilots—and there can be as many as 30 pilots—have the most potential for success as a series. And that’s been a very difficult task.”

Given the compressed time frame the networks have to make decisions, getting results quickly is key. “In the past,” Landry notes, “we had just been using all these open-ended questions basically to add a little bit of detail to our analysis or to support one of our findings with some consumer quotes. But we really had no way of really quantifying them. So it was all kind of messy and unscientific”

Canvs changed all that. “We are able to measure different levels of intensity within the same type of emotion,” Feldman asserts. “Depending on the context, emotions can have ranging levels of intensity, and subsequently provide indications of stronger or weaker interest. This allows us to understand which of these intense emotions will positively drive viewership moving forward.”

The speed and the depth of what Canvs was able to deliver proved to be a huge boon for Landry and his team. “Out of the hundreds of TV shows that are developed annually, every network is going to be lucky to have one, maybe two hits,” he says, alluding to a stat that Netflix, Facebook and other companies new to the TV world would do well to bear in mind. “When the success rate is that low, people are relying on our research and insights to better hedge their bets as to what shows have the most potential of success. So, the insights we were able to glean were incredibly important. And on top of that, our turnaround time is shorter than ever. So it makes for a bit of a perfect storm as to how we were able to navigate through this year’s pilot season.”

While Canvs started out in the TV world, Feldman sees this new product carrying them way beyond. “Any type of company that wants to understand emotions and why people take action when they do should be using this,” says Feldman. His plan to give new users the ability to process 5,000 open-ended questions for free is his way of proving this.

“Once they get a taste of how powerful this is, how much insight this can give them, they’ll wonder how they ever got by without it.”

That’s a feeling I can most definitely relate to.

Author of the best-selling "Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry." Co-Founder/Lead Analyst at TV[R]EV, where we help companies understand and profit from the seismic changes happening in the industry. I do a lot of speaking ...